Author: Robert Zimmerman

Today’s blacklisted American: Ivy league professor to fail two students for not wearing masks

10:55 am

Monger email asking students to snitch on others
Click for original screen capture.

Persecution is now cool! Bruce Monger, the director of undergraduate studies for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, has told his students in an email that he is failing two of them, not for bad classwork or poor test grades, but because they did not wear their masks properly in class.

His email was a request to all his students to help him identify these two students, or to put it more honestly, to snitch on them.

To the right is a screen capture of that email, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here.

Interestingly, Monger’s threat does not follow university policy, and is likely one that in a just world would get him in trouble, not the students.
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Court denies Blue Origin’s suit against NASA lunar lander contract award to SpaceX

10:17 am

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims yesterday denied Blue Origin’s suit against NASA’s lunar lander contract award to SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

NASA has immediately said it “will resume work with SpaceX under the Option A contract as soon as possible.”

I guess Blue Origin might have to consider the idea of actually building stuff now.

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Astronomers release fantasy proposals for government telescopes in the 2020s

8:54 am

The astronomical community today released its newest decadal survey, a outline of what major new telescope projects that community recommends the federal government should fund for the next ten years.

More details here.

This is I think the seventh such decadal survey since the first in the early 1960s. In the past these surveys prompted the construction of numerous space telescopes, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and many others. Until 2000 these survey were enormously influential, which is why space-based astronomy boomed in the 1980s and 1990s.

Now I call it a fantasy because I think it unlikely that most of its proposals — especially the space-based projects — will see fruition, based on the recent history in this century. For example, the 2001 survey recommended the James Webb Space Telescope among many other recommendations. The cost overruns of that project however eventually caused almost all the other space-based proposals to be cancelled, not only in the 2000s but in the 2010s as well. Furthermore, the 2010 survey called for the building of WFIRST, another Webb-like big space telescope that is now called the Roman Telescope, and that project’s high cost and complexity has further forced the elimination of almost all other new space telescopes. Nor has Roman been built and launched in the 2010s as proposed. It is still under development, with the same kinds of cost orverruns and delayed seen with Webb, which means in the 2020s most of the new proposals in this latest decadal survey will have to take a back seat to it, and will likely never get built.

Prove of my analysis is in the report’s press release:

The first mission to enter this program should be an infrared/optical/ultraviolet (IR/O/UV) telescope — significantly larger than the Hubble Space Telescope — that can observe planets 10 billion times fainter than their star, and provide spectroscopic data on exoplanets, among other capabilities. The report says this large strategic mission is of an ambitious scale that only NASA can undertake and for which the U.S. is uniquely situated to lead. At an estimated cost of $11 billion, implementation of this IR/O/UV telescope could begin by the end of the decade, after the mission and technologies are matured, and a review considers it ready for implementation. If successful, this would lead to a launch in the first half of the 2040 decade. [emphasis mine]

Proposing something that won’t be built for two decades is absurd. And the cost is even more absurd, as it is ten times what Hubble cost and seems more designed as a long term jobs program where nothing will get built but money will continue to pour in endlessly to the contractors and astronomers hired. That is what Webb and Roman essentially became.

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Skimming over the cloud tops of Jupiter

8:29 am

Skimming over the cloud tops of Jupiter
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The computer visualization above is based on a orbital image of Jupiter taken by Juno, but processed by citizen scientist Ryan Cornell to give, as he puts it, a view “as if we had a low orbit above the clouds.”

I estimate the scale of these clouds is quite large, with the Earth easily fitting inside the orange band on the right. The sharp horizon edge is a not accurate, however, as the clouds would have a decidedly fuzzy boundary, possibly many thousand miles in extent.

Nonetheless, it is a fun image that begins to give us a sense of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

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Landing site chosen for Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander

11:57 pm

NASA scientists have now chosen the landing site for the privately built Nova-C lunar lander, built and designed by Intuitive Machines, that late next year will carry three science instruments to a ridge close to Shackleton Crater near the Moon’s south pole.

NASA data from spacecraft orbiting the Moon indicate this location, referred to as the “Shackleton connecting ridge,” could have ice below the surface. The area receives sufficient sunlight to power a lander for roughly a 10-day mission, while also providing a clear line of sight to Earth for constant communications. It also is close to a small crater, which is ideal for a robotic excursion.

These conditions offer the best chance of success for the three technology demonstrations aboard. This includes the NASA-funded Polar Resources Ice-Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) – which consists of a drill paired with a mass spectrometer – a 4G/LTE communications network developed by Nokia of America Corporation, and Micro-Nova, a deployable hopper robot developed by Intuitive Machines.

One of the goals of the mission is to drill down three feet to see if ice can be detected. Another is to simply test this engineering to better refine it for the many other unmanned lunar missions that will follow in the next few years.

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Boeing wins FCC approval for its own satellite internet constellation

11:45 pm

Capitalism in space: After four years of review, the FCC has finally approved a license for Boeing to launch its own internet constellation of 147 satellites.

The license requires Boeing to launch half the constellation by ’27, with the rest in orbit by ’30.

The real significance of this constellation, combined with those being launched by SpaceX, OneWeb, Amazon, and even the Chinese, is that they are creating a gigantic demand for launch services. A lot of rockets of all kinds from many companies are going to be needed to put in orbit the tens of thousands of satellites now proposed.

Such demand, should it continue, guarantees that launch costs will drop, because there will be a lot of business and competition to force the costs down.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Parents threatened by Child Protective Services for protecting their kids from COVID

12:24 pm

Owned by government

Today’s blacklist story illustrates that no one is safe from the oppressive thumb of government, not even those who are clearly liberal and generally support Democrats. In this case we have the parents of two children, Eli and Kavitha Kasargod-Staub, who decided to keep the kids from their Washington, D.C., school because of their continuing concerns about COVID. As a result they were threatened with losing custody of those children by child protective services.

Kavitha Kasargod-Staub was looking forward to sending her two kids back to elementary school this fall. After a year of remote learning in Washington, D.C., her kids spent the summer attending day camp. “I’m certainly not in the group of people who avoid all Covid risk,” she said, adding that camp activities were outdoors and there was testing for children if someone was exposed to the virus.

But by August, Kasargod-Staub and her husband were watching Delta variant cases rise across the region. When her husband went to the school to review its safety protocols, he left alarmed, having learned that the HVAC system was broken and there was no plan for outdoor eating. Kasaragod-Staub, who had served as PTA president the year before, called up the principal to discuss. “The policies were vague, everyone was scrambling, so we decided to keep [our kids] home for the first week of school in the hopes that [D.C. Public Schools] would realize they made a mistake and catch up with things like testing and outdoor eating,” she told The Intercept. “It feels a little dumb now, but I genuinely thought things would change and they’d figure safety stuff out.”

Things didn’t change, and the children stayed home. Pretty soon, Kasargod-Staub was notified that her family was being referred to D.C.’s Child and Family Services Agency due to her kids’ unexcused absences. “I have a lot of privilege, I know the system, and it was still terrifying,” she said. “My mind immediately goes to, ‘Where will this lead? Are they going to take away my kids?’”

Kasargod-Staub was soon contacted by a government social worker for an intake call. “The person I spoke to said, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, we don’t have any sense of where this will go,’” she recalled. About a week and a half later, things escalated, and child protective services called to schedule a home visit. [emphasis mine]

Though the parents began teaching the kids using a variety of home-school programs, they had not officially removed their kids from the school, which would allow them to claim they were home-schooling them. Nor had they qualified for remote learning, because “D.C. Public Schools … requires a doctor to certify that virtual school is necessary.” Thus, the arrival of child protective services, which became increasingly threatening, step-by-step, first by asking the questions that were more and more invasive and inappropriate. Then,
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Astronomers detect water in the very very early universe

9:14 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the ALMA telescope in Chile, astronomers have detected the molecules of water and carbon monoxide in a galaxy thought to have formed only 780 million years after the Big Bang.

SPT0311-58 is actually made up of two galaxies and was first seen by ALMA scientists in 2017 at its location, or time, in the Epoch of Reionization. This epoch occurred at a time when the Universe was just 780 million years old—roughly 5-percent of its current age—and the first stars and galaxies were being born. Scientists believe that the two galaxies may be merging, and that their rapid star formation is not only using up their gas, or star-forming fuel but that it may eventually evolve the pair into massive elliptical galaxies like those seen in the Local Universe.

“Using high-resolution ALMA observations of molecular gas in the pair of galaxies known collectively as SPT0311-58 we detected both water and carbon monoxide molecules in the larger of the two galaxies. Oxygen and carbon, in particular, are first-generation elements, and in the molecular forms of carbon monoxide and water, they are critical to life as we know it,” said Sreevani Jarugula, an astronomer at the University of Illinois and the principal investigator on the new research. “This galaxy is the most massive galaxy currently known at high redshift, or the time when the Universe was still very young. It has more gas and dust compared to other galaxies in the early Universe, which gives us plenty of potential opportunities to observe abundant molecules and to better understand how these life-creating elements impacted the development of the early Universe.”

Need I say that there are many uncertainties with this result, including the assumption that the universe is only 780 million years old at location of this galaxy. That age is extrapolated from the galaxy’s red shift, a link that depends on some uncertain assumptions. Moreover, the discovery of these molecules so soon after the theorized Big Bang is unexpected. Cosmologists had assumed that at this early age the universe wasn’t old enough yet to form galaxies with such complex molecules.

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Hubble still in safe mode

9:05 am

NASA released a new but relatively terse update on November 1st describing the status of the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in safe mode since October 25th.

Hubble’s science instruments issued error codes at 1:46 a.m. EDT Oct. 23, indicating the loss of a specific synchronization message. This message provides timing information the instruments use to correctly respond to data requests and commands. The mission team reset the instruments, resuming science operations the following morning.

At 2:38 a.m. EDT, Oct. 25, the science instruments again issued error codes indicating multiple losses of synchronization messages. As a result, the science instruments autonomously entered safe mode states as programmed.

Mission team members are evaluating spacecraft data and system diagrams to better understand the synchronization issue and how to address it. They also are developing and testing procedures to collect additional data from the spacecraft. These activities are expected to take at least one week.

In other words, the engineers presently do not understand the problem, and are working at pinpointing its cause.

This is not a “glitch”. If used properly that word really refers to something that is akin to a short burp in operations. Hubble has been shut down now for ten days, and will remain so for at least one more week. This is a serious problem that remains unsolved.

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